Content marketing is all the rage these days and for good reason, it works. So what is it? It is the art of creating valuable and consistent content that makes people want to read and share it. Giants like Ted, IBM, Chipotle and HubSpot are pretty much publishers in their own right, they have played the content marketing game like it’s a sport and it has worked out well for them. They do, however, have innovative visionaries at their helm and big budgets to back them. Without the big budget, how do you, take advantage of the content creation game? With your blog, of course.

Your company blog is a magical place that can help in so many areas of marketing. It can help get people into your business, drive sales, create brand awareness and up your search engine optimization (SEO) standing. Your blog is what allows you to be your very own publisher, yet businesses often forget that and think of it as a relic from the 90s. It is your not-so-secret weapon, so build a great one, let us help!

Audience

Like all things in communications and marketing, it is insanely important to gauge your audience. You don’t have to hire a fancy firm to market test it for you, you know who your audience is. If your audience is active women between the ages of 18-55, don’t write about things that a male long-haul trucker wants to know about – but you know that already. When developing content don’t assume that everyone knows the same acronyms that you do. Even if it’s long, spell it out for your audience at least once, like we did up there in the second paragraph with SEO.

Intro

An intro is the most important part of writing and not just for bloggers and for authors, journalists, copywriters, anyone really. An intriguing intro can pull your reader in while a boring intro can immediately turn people off. Let’s say that your audience is financial auditors, they are still people, not robots. Make it interesting for them or you will lose them.

Subheadings

It has been proven by researchers far smarter than us, like those at the Poynter Institute, that people absolutely do NOT want to read large blocks of words. People would prefer to skim content and pick out what is of interest to them. Breaking up your blog into bite-sized, manageable chunks will increase the amount of people who read your blog through to the end. An audience also really like subheadings, like we’ve been doing in this post and many that came before it. Subheadings can allow a reader to decide if that particular chunk of content is of interest to them.

Organize

If writing does not come naturally to you and even if it does, you should make a quick organizational schematic of what you want to say. It doesn’t have to take long, just organize your ideas so that they flow from one to another. You don’t want to lose people by talking about dog training in one sentence and digital marketing in another.

These are all good jumping off points to help you build a better blog, but they come with a caveat. None of this will do you much good if you don’t have a message that people want to read. They will never find your blog in a sea of online content if you don’t give them something they are interested in. The foundation of content marketing is creating something valuable. That is where we can help, call us up, have a coffee or a drink with us and we can help get your content marketing turn into a well-oiled machine.

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